Website Load Testing Tools?

bLanark asks: "I'm in the process of converting one of my clients from IIS/CGI to Apache/mod_perl. I need a (free) web site stress/load test tool to prove that performance will be increased. Using this page as my starting point, I can see that there are quite a few tools to investigate. Has anyone used any of these (or any others) and what are they like. I need HTTP GETS, form POSTing, and clever stuff like simulation of caching of images would be useful too, I guess." The previous story didn't get much of a response, but that was about a year ago, but the submittor has shared a fairly impressive list with us, impressions about any piece of software on it would be greatly appreciated.

Comments

Be sure to simulate "real life"

[linuxwrangler]

At least as much as possible.

In a previous job we needed to do some benchmarking and testing. The first pass was to script some stuff using wget. Once everything looked fine (we could really slam the server) we turned it loose on the public.

Oops. The site collapsed nearly instantly. The problem was that people with slow modem connections kept connections active for a couple orders of magnitude longer than happened on our internal network and the server ran out of resources.

Microsoft's free tool can simulate a mix of connection speeds and I believe you can find similar functionality in many of the web test tools you will find in a freshmeat.net search.